FoundationDB joins ACID Transaction Crusade…

I’m not talking to myself any longer on why I believe NoSQL databases should always have ACID Transactions. Now FoundationDB have put on record a detailed analysis of other NoSQL databases’ claims around ACID, and why very few actually live up to ‘true ACID compliance’. Read on for more…

FoundationDB have published an excellent overview of why everyone needs ACID Transactions. I agree with them on this assessment. You wouldn’t run a CRM system on an RDBMS that wasn’t ACID compliant, so why would you do the same with your NoSQL managed data loads? [1]

FoundationDB’s Transaction Manifesto can be found online here. It’s worth a read, and doesn’t get too techy when explaining the value, so I’d recommend everyone working on NoSQL databases has a good read, and inwardly digests it’s information.

In addition, Foundation DB has performed a comparison of NoSQL databases’ claims. Turns out through their analysis that only FoundationDB, MarkLogic and Spanner provide true ACID Transaction support.

Naturally, there are a few disclaimers on that page, and the information will be in flux as non-compliant vendors race to add this functionality. (Despite weirdly stating at the same time that they don’t think ACID compliance is necessary.)

The NoSQL ACID Compliance comparison page is definitely worth a read too. You can get it from here on Foundation DB’s website.

All in all, a good piece of simple comparison work… Glad they did it, saves me researching it for my next blog post!!! Thanks guys and gals @ FoundationDB!

Footnote

[1] Many NoSQL databases, like Redis, are used not as the primary manager/source of data, and so ACID transactions in this instance are not needed. If you want to run mission-critical loads on a NoSQL database, though, they absolutely are required in my opinion.